With Syria at war, can Turkey and Ocalan still bring Kurds peace?

ISTANBUL/SURUC, Turkey, Oct 16 (Reuters) - As southeast
Turkey's Kurds rioted last week in fury at Ankara's refusal to
rescue the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani from advancing
Islamists, it was to Abdullah Ocalan that Prime Minister Ahmet
Davutoglu turned for help.

Sitting in jail on the windswept island where he has spent
the last 15 years, Ocalan wields more power as a peacemaker than
he ever did as the guerrilla commander leading a Kurdish
insurgency in which 40,000 people have died.

But as the Syrian conflict unleashes forces in Turkey that
neither side can fully control, time may be running out for
Ankara to make peace with the Kurds.

"The peace process is already shaky without Kobani. Kobani
is further rocking its foundations. If Kobani falls, it might be
difficult to sustain," said Ozgur Unluhisarcikli from the German
Marshall Fund's Ankara office.

For now, both sides remain committed.

From his prison cell, the leader of the outlawed Kurdistan
Workers' Party (PKK) urged pro-Kurdish politicians to try to
avert further bloodshed and keep on track the peace process that
he launched with Ankara two years ago.

They duly met ministers and issued appeals that calmed the
violence. On Thursday, Besir Atalay, deputy head of the ruling
AK Party, reaffirmed the government's commitment to the peace
process, saying a "road map" was being circulated and promising
more steps in the coming days. Ocalan's word still counts for
plenty among the followers who fondly call him "Apo".

"Apo is our everything; he is the reason why the whole world
knows about Kurds," said taxi driver Muslum Bilgic, 36, smoking
at a tea house in the Turkish town of Suruc, 10 km (six miles)
north of Kobani. "I don't have a picture of my father at home,
but I have a picture of Ocalan."

FROM "BABY KILLER" TO GRANDFATHER FIGURE

This weekend, a pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP)
delegation will meet PKK commanders in the Qandil mountains of
northern Iraq before talks with Ocalan on Imrali on Oct. 21.

The fact that "Apo" still commands the loyalty of the PKK
also gives the government good reason to value a figure once
routinely labelled "baby killer" in Turkish newspapers.

After his capture in Kenya in 1999, Turks were most familiar
with images of him dazed, blindfolded and handcuffed, flanked by
the balaclava-wearing commandos who flew him back to Turkey.

But now, a man who was only saved from the gallows by a
change in the law appears in Turkish media as a benign
cardigan-wearing grandfather figure, grey-haired, moustachioed
and smiling in photos taken in jail and released by the
government.

Pro-government circles in Turkey have gone so far as to
portray last week's unrest over Kobani, in which dozens were
killed, as part of a plot to undermine the peacemaking role of a
skilled negotiator.

"One goal of this spiral of terror and violence was to end
the peace process, leaving Abdullah Ocalan to rot eternally in
prison and effectively eliminating him from political life,"
Rasim Ozan Kutahyali wrote in a column in the newspaper Sabah.

One prominent pro-government journalist this week even
appeared to float the idea of Ocalan being moved from Imrali,
saying Turkey should "consider his position".

In declaring a ceasefire in March last year and ordering his
fighters to withdraw to their bases in the mountains of northern
Iraq, Ocalan may have sensed that peace was his best hope of
ever being freed. Yet President Tayyip Erdogan also has a hefty
stake in the process.

Ocalan's PKK has stopped demanding the full secession it
once fought for, but Erdogan has had to face down considerable
nationalist hostility even to push through cultural and
linguistic reforms that fall far short of the limited autonomy
that many Kurds now seek.

The payoff, if it comes, would be the "peace dividend" of
growth in a region frozen out of investment by three decades of
conflict, just as Turkey is finding economic impetus hard to
come by.

But the war in Syria has made the poison on both sides much
more potent.

Many in Ankara have argued that alienating the Kurds in the
short term by refusing to send Turkish forces across the Syrian
border to help their ethnic kin is a price worth paying to avoid
being sucked into Syria's complex war.

Moreover, the YPG, the heavily outgunned Syrian Kurdish
militia that has been defending Kobani against the fighters of
Islamic State, has close ties to the PKK. To many in the Turkish
government, this makes it impossible even to allow weapons from
elsewhere in Syria to reach the YPG via Turkish territory.

A government comment saying it viewed the YPG in the same
light as Islamic State, whose massacres and beheadings have
driven 200,000 Syrian Kurds to flee into Turkey, was guaranteed
to inflame tempers among Turkey's Kurds.

At the same time, many in the PKK sense that Western
sympathy for the plight of Syria's Kurds might also raise the
international profile of the PKK and strengthen their own hand
against Ankara.

Ocalan's appeal for calm failed to convince some militants,
who attacked and killed police officers in Bingol province,
while PKK rebels also clashed with Turkish troops on the Iraqi
border. The government reportedly retaliated with the first
substantial air strikes since peace talks began.

INFLUENCE FRAYING?

Ocalan's Kurdish critics say the withdrawal of PKK fighters
since he declared a ceasefire has yielded few if any concrete
concessions, or even serious negotiations, from the government.

"The historical role that Ocalan has played still gives him
a high degree of influence, but this is fraying at the edges,"
said Sinan Ulgen, head of the Centre for Economic and Foreign
Policy Studies in Istanbul.

Young radicalised factions within the PKK may also be
growing resentful of the influence still wielded by an ageing
man who has been behind bars for more than a decade.

Cemil Bayik, the top PKK figure in its headquarters-in-exile
in Iraq's Qandil mountains, made clear in uncompromising
language this week that he held Erdogan's AK Party responsible
for Kobani and the unrest in southeast Turkey.

"We have warned Turkey. If they continue on this path, then
the guerrillas will relaunch our defensive war to protect our
people," he told German television, adding that some Kurdish
fighters withdrawn from Turkey last year had now returned.

It may be questionable whether the PKK would risk opening
another front and alienating Western powers by reviving its
conflict with Turkey now, but the focus is very much on Kobani.

Intense bombing by U.S.-led coalition warplanes appeared
this week to have halted the Islamists' advance, a glimmer of
good news for the town's Kurdish defenders.

But without more arms and ammunition to help the Kurds on
the ground, the town's fate remains precarious, and with it that
of the peace process.

"If Kobani falls, there will be a civil war in Turkey," said
Bilgic, the Kurdish taxi driver.

"If Kobani falls, Apo won't be able to control the streets.
The word for peace comes from Ocalan, but the act of war is
carried out by Qandil."
(Additional reporting by Jonny Hogg and Gulsen Solaker in
Ankara; Writing by Daren Butler; Editing by Kevin Liffey)